Author: scott

Bubbly & Bogus

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Okay, I am in need of the Wisdom of the Crowd.

The translator who’s turning the Uglies series into complex Chinese wrote me to ask for a little help with the terms “bubbly” and “bogus.”

As she puts it, “When these terms show up in different places, according to the context, the meanings are not exactly the same, which means when I translate them into Chinese, they might have several versions for the same English words or terms. I hope I can stick with the same expression when it comes to the same English word, so hopefully I can create the Chinese terms that will meet all your definitions.”

Reading that, I realize once more how tough a translator’s job is. And word-inventing writers like me are probably a thousand times more crazy-making than normal. So us native English speakers should help her out.

What do the words “bubbly” and “bogus” mean to you? And how do their various meanings all relate to each other?

Fan Mail

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I get a fair amount of fan mail, enough that I don’t get back to most people. I’m more than a little sorry about that, and hope that all of you who send questions, enthusiasms, and remonstrations can understand.

It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s that you outnumber me.

But every once in a while comes a letter that is a bit different. This one from Annalisa in Colorado says things that lots of you have said, except with an unexpected twist at the end. I thought that maybe the rest of you might enjoy it.

Picture two girls, both pretty in their own way, but self-conscious to the point of believing themselves ugly. One girl is me; the other is Tally in Uglies. Tally and I both live in a world where there are pretty people, like models and movie stars, who make us feel ugly by their perfection. Tally believed that her eyes were too close together, her nose squashed, and her hair frizzy. Except for my long hair, I also used to believe I was ugly. After reading your book, I realized that true beauty is a result of our actions and not our face. You book moved me to act.

When I read Uglies, I could totally relate to Tally. I could tell she was a risk taker. I, too, wanted to take risks. Tally risks everything by journeying to the Smoke but realizes that friendship is more important than beauty. When she thinks, “If only people were smarter, evolved enough to treat everyone the same even if they looked different. Looked ugly,” (p97) I was moved. Tally got me thinking more about others than myself. I had seen pictures of girls with cancer who were bald, and realized I had no right to complain.

Around the time I finished your book, I decided to be a risk taker like Tally. I cut off eleven inches of hair, donating it to Locks of Love to make wigs for cancer patients who might believe they are ugly because of their baldness. This action made me feel beautiful inside despite losing one of my best features. I realized what David meant when he told Tally, “What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful” (279).

Tally taught me about sacrificing to help others and the importance of inner beauty. After meeting Tally, I hold my chin a little higher and stand a little straighter, because I know I am pretty, no matter what anybody says and no matter how short my hair is. Thanks you for teaching me what beauty really is, and for inspiring the confidence inside me.

So you can probably see why I wanted to share that. Hearing from you guys—all of you—really is one of the best things about this job.

I’m looking forward to seeing tons of you on the upcoming tour.

Locks of Love lives here, by the way.

Countdown Timer

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So a fan sent me this litle doo-hickey. Feel free to steal it and stick it on your websites and desktops.

The easiest way to put this on your own site is to click on OPTIONS, then choose GET EMBED CODE. Choose your platform, then drop it into your website. The supported platforms include HTML, MySpace, Xanga, Blogger, and a bunch more.

Enjoy!

Fall Starts

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The first of several autumn releases for the Uglies series arrives in stores today . . .

Yes, it’s the paperback version of Specials.

Note the new tagline for those of you who really didn’t like the old boring one!

Also, there’s a pink circle (known as a “burst” in publishing) talking about “Exclusive Content!” That refers to all the fine downloadable content at Behind the Pulse, including an e-book version of the end of Specials, with “director’s notes” by me.

Basically, I went through the last chapter and explained a bunch of stuff, like special features on a DVD. Specials was a particularly interesting book to do, because it almost ended on an entirely different note. (Wise editors intervened.)

Here’s the direct link to check out what I mean.

One other thing about the paperback: it has chapters two and three of Extras in the back. Along with this blog post, the first three chapters are now out in the wild!

Speaking of Extras, Justine was buying a big stack of Hikaru No Go at a Borders near us, and ran across this big ol’ sign:

Me and Jenna Bush. Hmm.

Completing the autumnal roll-outs will be the boxed set of the trilogy, available in the US on October 23.

Pre-order it here.

So Yesterday in Brazil

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International Cover Month concludes with the brazillionth version of So Yesterday. (Okay, there haven’t really been a brazillion yet, but this one is from Brazil.)

The paper doll theme is brilliant, and you can really appreciate the concept when you fold out the entire jacket—front, back, spine, and flaps:

But what’s really fun is the webcard for the cover. I dare you not to giggle while watching that.

Oh, and here’s the publisher’s site for all you Portuguese speakers.

I’m pretty sure that tao ontem means “so yesterday” in Portuguese, so it’s one of the rare direct translations of the title. I wonder if it means the same thing in Brazil.

Okay, no more furrin’ covers for a while. I’m going to be blogging about Extras pretty obsessively for the next 23 days, which is how long till Book 4 comes out.

Next week, I’ll be unveiling the Extras Countdown Timer!

Madeleine L’Engle, RIP

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The author of A Wrinkle in Time has left us. Her work is one of the things that made me a writer, a science fiction and fantasy fan, an avid reader. Hers were the first books I read that mixed math and magic, the quest and the quantum. To put it simply, without L’Engle’s tesseracts, Midnighters would have no tridecalogisms.

Here are a few more thoughts I put down for New York Magazine‘s Culture Blog.

And here Gwenda Bond quotes L’Engle at length on what authors know or don’t know about what their novels mean.

According to the NY Times obit, A Wrinkle in Time has sold six million copies since 1962, but lately moves only 15,000 copies per year. One copy a year for every 20,000 Americans? Somewhere, IT is having a good laugh, and getting ready.

How many of you guys have read her work? (Believe me, you should.)

Chinese So Yesterday

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The next entry in the ongoing International Covers Week (Month? Year?) is the following:

It’s the complex Chinese version of So Yesterday.

“Complex Chinese?” you may ask. “Isn’t all Chinese pretty complex?”

Here’s a factoid that I didn’t totally get until I started to be translated: There are two written types of Chinese. Allow me to explain.

Complex Chinese is the traditional written form of the language. It goes back millenia—way before our Roman alphabet, way before anything else currently in use. But people still use it in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. On the other hand, simplified Chinese was created in the last century, when the Chinese government was trying to make all those ideograms easier to learn. It’s used in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia.

Luckily for us authors, these two kinds of Chinese are usually sold to different publishers. We get to sell the same book twice! For example, Jelei in China owns the simplified rights to Uglies, and Sharp Point in Taiwan owns the complex rights for the same book.

So Yesterday is published by a Taiwanese company with my favorite name ever: Meowbus. Check out this cool feature on their site: behind-the-scene photos of the cover shoot.

What a great idea, especially for a teen imprint! This is the sort of thing that might actually make someone want to go to a publisher’s website (even if it is in complex Chinese).

Yay, Meowbus! (Okay, I just wanted to type “Meowbus” again.)

DragonTrain!

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We (being me, Justine, Maureen Johnson, Cassandra Clare, and Theo & Holly Black) just got back from Atlanta. We all took the train down there to DragonCon, a four-day sprawl of costumed mayhem and unashamed geekery.

Rather than issue separate reports, Maureen and I have pooled our video and stills of the event. On the train back, she swiftly and skillfully edited this embarrassment of riches (of embarrassment) down to Six Minutes that Will Change Your Brain:

Note the necessary greetings to absent writing partner John Green and his brother Hank.

There are a few more photos and scraps of video that I’ll be posting later, but quite frankly this is the definitive document. It was a fabulous four days (almost a week, including a day of the Cresent Line on either side). So thanks to my pals for letting me convince them to come.

And special thanks to the folk of the Con who make such fantastic and creative costumes, and to all the staff of the YA thread (Bev, Suzanne, Lydia, Karen, Heather, Tara, and Mary!) who invited us, squeed us, and showed us a great time.

And one more round of applause for Maureen for making the video happen . . . and for dressing up like Wonder Woman.

Downloadables!

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So as the crack publicity team for Extras swings into gear, I’m seeing some images I never saw before. For example, this uncropped photo from the US cover of Pretties:

Man, that is mildly freaky. Those two really do look more bubbleheaded in this bigger version. Something about the hair. I can see why the image was cropped a bit, so as not to scare anyone off. They look all zombified.

This uncropped image, and much more, can be found at the Behind the Pulse site for Uglies news and downloadables.

That’s right: downloadables! Chat icons, message board avatars, screen savers, and wallpaper like the picture above. You can have those glassy-eyed pretties in massive 1280 x 1024 size. Or giant uncropped Aya, or Tally behind the leaves, or Special Tally. And unlike Wearable Extras, it’s all free!

Here’s the Behind the Pulse homepage for Uglies.

Or you can click here to go straight to the downloadables. Like this nifty little animated icon gif:

Heh, heh. Sparkly.

Okay, Justine and I are headed off to DragonCon now. I’ll try to post from there, but you never know on the road.

You guys have a good weekend!

One for Sorrow

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I hope you’re having a good Barzak Day!

If you haven’t heard of Barzak Day, don’t feel bad. This is the first Barzak Day ever, because Chris Barzak’s very first novel is arriving in bookstores right now . . .

Beautiful cover, beautiful book. It was sent to me last year to blurb. Now, I’ve only written a few blurbs in my career (five or six), because I’m a slow reader and want to spend my blurbs wisely. But after reading One for Sorrow, I knew it was time to peel off another one from my tightly rubber-banded roll. Here it is:

“An honest and uncanny ride through the shadows between grief and acceptance. This is how real magic works.”
-Scott Westerfeld

Blurbs are hard to write. Distilling a whole novel into a few words, while trying to sell something to someone standing in a bookstore, is no easy task. But this felt like the right blurb for this novel. One for Sorrow is about that weird intersection between grief and magic, how sadness can bubble up and move the world in paranormal directions.

One thing that my blurb doesn’t convey is that this book is also scary, in a very cool way. Not the kind of scary where you’re nervous about a monster under your bed. More like the kind where you’re nervous that there might be, um, another universe under your bed. One where the rules are skewed and different and a little bit wrong, but that you’d probably crawl on into if you glimpsed it, just out of curiosity.

It’s that kind of book.

A quick word of warning: this book is also probably best for 14 and up. There are some fairly steamy scenes.

You can look up more details or buy it here.